Threads of Hope: Quilts of Love Series (2 page)

Over time, most of the staff became adept at avoiding eye-rolls when Janie blathered on about Bra. Though Daisy refused to abandon the idea that she might one day write a story about Bra and Janie’s relationship. She hoped Victoria’s Secret would think it a grand tale of a woman who referred to her lingerie in third person.

Now, faced with the prospect of swallowing food while enduring Brady and Janie, Nina rifled through her mental file of excuses. She barely had time to consider the choices when Daisy said, “We wouldn’t dream of missing an opportunity to send you off on your new adventure.” She glanced at Nina. “Would we?”

What Nina wanted to do at that moment was send Daisy twirling back across the partition. Instead, she mumbled
something about making sure she’d be free, grabbed her iPad, and hoped when she swiped her calendar she’d find an event so monumental it would be impossible to attend the dinner. But no. No White House interview, no late night talk show appearance, and no undercover expose planned. Just a reminder to drop off her clothes at the cleaner and buy a case of dog food.
Pathetic. My life needs a makeover
. She stared at the socially vacant month of April. “Well, I do have two things I’m committed to that day . . .” Nina avoided looking at Daisy and told Janie she didn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t be able to finish in time to attend the dinner.

Janie clapped her hands. “Wonderful! Check your emails because I’m sending e-vites with all the information and directions—” A piano riff sounded from her pocket. She pulled out her cell phone, then excused herself with an, “I have to answer this one.” The rhythm of her stiletto heels click-clacking on the wood floors accompanied her departure.

“Commitments? Since when did you have commitments?” Daisy could have replaced “commitments” with “children” and sounded no less surprised.

It was, after all, a word Nina had iced, figuratively speaking, along with others like
engagement, marriage, wedding gown
, and
honeymoon
. If only Nina could remember to forget some commitments in her life as much as she forgot to remember others, she wouldn’t have to place her dreams in the freezer.

“I consider feeding Manny and wearing clean clothes important responsibilities. Especially since they both cost more than I ever anticipated.” She had adopted her hybrid dog with the dachshund body and poodle hair from the local animal shelter almost a year ago. When she brought him home, she named him Manhattan and thought it clever and optimistic. Today, it just seemed ridiculous. The little runt developed severe food allergies and now required a special diet. She didn’t expect
him to be so high maintenance. Expectations did not seem to be working in her favor lately.

“If that works for you, then stay with it,” said Daisy as she scooted her chair back to her desk. She closed her laptop, gathered her environmentally-safe assortment of bags, and wiggled her metro-nylon backpack out of the bottom drawer. “I have two more people to interview for the yoga feature, so I’ll let you get back to that one-woman pity party I interrupted.”

“Thanks.” Nina clapped, Janie-like. “It saves me from sending an e-vite.”

“You actually smiled. One small step—”

Nina grabbed a sheet of paper out of her printer and waved it in front of her. “I surrender. I surrender. No more words of wisdom.”

Daisy laughed. “Okay, but the terms of surrender include walking to the stairs with me. You’ve been sitting so long I’m surprised you’re not numb. But, the bonus is you’ll make sure I actually leave. And leave you alone.”

“That, my dear, is motivation enough,” said Nina. She waited until the glass doors of the office shut behind them before she asked Daisy if she noted Brady’s conspicuous absence from the Janie show.

“Probably not as much as you did.” Daisy’s eyes swept over Nina’s face, and Nina knew desperation hovered there. “You need to let go of him in both places,” Daisy said as she pressed her hand first to her forehead and then to her heart. “Remember, ‘There’s a season for everything.’ ”

Nina sighed. “Is that some mantra you chant?”

Daisy pushed open the door to the stairwell. “No, but that’s not a bad idea.” She paused, shifted her backpack, and said, “By the way, it’s not new age-y talk. It’s old age-y. Very old, as in Old Testament. King Solomon.”

“So, you’re telling me I’m in a very long line of people who know what it’s like not to get what they want? I suppose that’s some comfort,” said Nina drily. Comfort and God hadn’t been synonymous for her since before her brother was hospitalized. It wasn’t so much that she gave up on God. She just chose not to give in to Him.

“The real comfort is, the line didn’t end there,” said Daisy. “See you tomorrow. Take care of yourself.”

Nina watched Daisy and couldn’t help but notice that, despite the baggage she carried, Daisy floated down the stairs as if she carried no weight at all.

Do you know the origin of the word
deadline
?”

“Hmm. Let me think. Does it have something to do with cutting off service to the cell phone of your friend who persists in calling you when she knows you’re working?” Nina’s eyes stayed focused on the screen while her fingers continued their waltz over the keys of her laptop. The few paragraphs she needed to finish the piece tapped their feet in the waiting room of her brain. If she didn’t concentrate, they’d fly out the door and, from experience, she knew coercing them to return was almost impossible.

“You have me on speaker phone, don’t you?” Aretha’s accusation was as loud as it was unmistakable. “That’s it. I’m buying you a Bluetooth device for those perky ears of yours.”

Nina bit her bottom lip, typed in a few key words to pacify the paragraphs, and picked up her cell phone. “You’re off now,” she mashed the speaker button, then held the phone to her ear as she plowed through the contents of her purse hoping to excavate a buried Snickers bar. “And I have no idea where deadline originated, and I don’t need to know at this moment because I’m less than an hour away from meeting mine.” She pulled out an empty Twix wrapper, two smashed
cheese crackers, and an aging peppermint. Her stomach rumbled in disappointment. “What’s up? And the microwave version.” They’d been roommates a little over a year, and Nina learned Aretha couldn’t tell someone the time without detailing where, when, and why she bought her watch.

“Well, if you’d bother to listen to your voicemails you’d know what’s up. The fact that you’re so cranky ought to remind you we’re waiting for you at Carrabba’s. It was your idea to eat Italian this month. Remember?”

Girls’ Night Out. She forgot. Again. “It can’t be seven o’clock already . . .” Had it been that long since Daisy left? She stood and looked around the room. With the exception of a few interns huddled around
Grey’s Anatomy
, she was the lone staff writer left in the office.

Squinting to check the clock in the corner of her computer screen, she heard Aretha’s voice, “No. It’s almost thirty minutes later.”

Nina figured by the time she finished checking and rechecking the article before sending it off to Elise, the girls would already be ordering or eating dessert. Doubtful they’d want to wait for her to catch up. Not that she could blame them. And if she wasn’t already holding her breath to button her jeans, she’d go straight for the tiramisu and skip dinner altogether. With enough misery threaded into her voice to gather a bit of sympathy, Nina said, “I’m so sorry. I have to get this story in on time. Especially after today . . . but I’ll tell you more about that later. Please ask the girls to forgive me for making them wait.”

She truly meant the part about being sorry. In college, Nina chose not to rush for a sorority, mainly because she never received an invitation. It wasn’t until she and Aretha became roommates that she began to let loose of the notion that all women her age were younger versions of her mother, eager to
provide a list of her shortcomings in the name of helping her become the way God meant her to be. Nina felt comfortable with this group, and she didn’t want to jeopardize that friendship by being the lone no-show every month.

“You’re just lucky we all like you or else we’d have voted you off the dinner table by now,” said Aretha. “I suppose you want an order to go.”

Nina thought she felt her stomach applaud. “Yes, please. Pasta Weesie.”

“You know you order that every time? I think you just like saying the name,” she said and sounded less frustrated and more amused. “Let me hang up or else they’ll start thinking I’m redecorating the kitchen or something.”

Aretha, in her last semester of interior design school, had a “fabulous idea to make this room pop” almost everywhere they went. At the last dinner, the group threatened to blindfold her just to have a conversation not focused on window treatments or paint colors.

Knowing she’d be met by fettuccine Alfredo with shrimp motivated Nina to push herself through the article, assembling what remained like puzzle pieces, snapping them into place until the picture was complete. Not that profiling candidates for local county elections made for riveting writing. And that was exactly the problem. Nina hoped there was a story waiting for her to find it. A story that would prompt Elise to maybe send a two-line email. A story that would begin to pave her way to the Big Apple.

“Miss O’Malley?”

Startled, Nina’s body hiccupped. She took a deep breath and recognized the lilac perfume Shannon, one of the interns, typically wore. Nina turned to face her. “Now that I know it’s you, what scares me more is your using ‘Miss.’ It ages me five years.”

“I’m sorry.” A smile flickered across Shannon’s face as she slid her pearl drop back and forth on her necklace chain. “We’re all leaving. Do you want us, me, to wait for you?” The other interns, three young women who looked like they shopped in each other’s closets, hovered a cubicle away.

Nina stretched back in her chair, mowed her fingers through her entirely-too-short hair, then stared at her monitor. “Not much more to go.” She looked at Shannon and realized she didn’t even know her last name. Or even what she did for the magazine. Have I been that cocooned in my own life? Earlier, Elise encouraged her to network. Nina realized at that moment she better begin in her own office. But clearly not now.

“So . . . um . . . does that mean it’s okay for us to go?” Shannon asked as if she had dropped Nina off for her first day of kindergarten and needed the teacher’s permission to leave.

Distracted by her own shortcomings, she’d created another by not answering Shannon’s question. “Oh, of course, of course,” she replied and sounded perkier than she meant to. “I shouldn’t be long, and Nelson can walk me to my car.”

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Shannon, and she trailed after her friends as they headed out the door.

It didn’t register until after Nina had clicked “send” that she forgot to thank Shannon for thinking about her. How inconsiderate.

Nina didn’t know if she heard her mother’s voice just then or her own.

Did her mother always have to be right?

Nina had asked herself that question, she supposed, since she could first express a coherent thought. The answer didn’t change. Sometimes Sheila wasn’t 100 percent right, but on
some weird pie chart of probabilities, there would always be a slice for her mother. Little wonder her father spent so much time shrugging his shoulders and shuffling into his mancave when his wife’s pronouncements fell like stinging rain.

In sixth grade, Nina became friends with Elizabeth Hamilton, and Sheila told her she should stay away from her because “that girl’s nothing but trouble.” With every trouble-free year that passed, Nina reminded her mother what she had said about her friend. Four years of trouble-free, until the tenth grade when Elizabeth had a “stomach virus” that eight months later was named Andy. And Sheila reminded her daughter what she had said about her friend.

During her junior year of high school, Nina started being invited to parties given by girls who wore shoes that cost more than all of her clothes. They didn’t seem to mind picking her up in their sleek cars, the ones that didn’t have names, just initials. They even let her wear their dresses to school dances where the beautiful girls met the handsome boys, and they moved inside their own force field that kept everyone else away. One day, on the way to the women’s Bible study at church, her mother said, “Those girls are just buttering you up to use you. One day, they’re going to drop you like a hot potato.”

Nina laughed. “What could I possibly have that those girls would ever want? Is it too hard for you to believe popular kids could like me?”

Some days after school, Nina would be invited to one of their houses, the ones kept behind gates. They’d ask their maids to fix them something to eat, escape to the kids’ den where they would listen to music, watch television, and complain about homework. They were so very impressed with Nina’s ability to understand calculus, analyze poetry, and write essays. They asked for her help, flattered her. It felt good to be needed. She noticed, though, as weeks passed, that the more
she did to help them, the less they did to help themselves. When Nina refused to write Courtney’s research paper because she could barely complete her own, she faded from their sight a little bit every day. Until one day, she was completely invisible. And Sheila reminded her daughter of what she had said about her friends.